


Doctor Strange: discussion about sex, emotional acceptance and subtext in the comics

by startrekfan



Series: Doctor Strange Metas [26]
Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Doctor Strange (Comics)
Genre: Abuse, Addicts, Alcohol, Angst, Character Analysis, Childhood, Headcanon, Psychology, Sex, linking the facts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-21 02:08:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14906372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/startrekfan/pseuds/startrekfan





	Doctor Strange: discussion about sex, emotional acceptance and subtext in the comics

Stephen is full of sexual frustration: because of all the shit his father probably used to say, he thought for many years that he was a freak, both because of his “weird magic phenomena” when he was a kid as for his sexuality. We already saw in the comics (canon) Stephen likes orgies and that he always ends up alone and heartbroken because he gets attached to people very easily: he goes out with someone for casual sex, the person and him do the things and afterwards, he wants the person to stay but the person just leaves because they just wanted casual sex from the start, and that breaks him. Sex is one of his coping mechanisms for getting affection and feeling loved (totally the wrong move). He feels loved and important when someone else craves him, that would explain how he can be very extreme (orgies, aliens, mystic beings etc.). Before the car crash, Stephen was in a VERY comfortable zone, he had his things, his money, his “friends”, his perfect life, even if him and Christine weren’t romantically together anymore, they still were friends and still worked together, he had money to spend and the best alcoholic drinks, the best cigarettes, the best everything to suffice his coping mechanism and he had an image to protect, so his sex adventures probably were a lot more physical, just for pleasure, heat of the moment like. Sorcerer Stephen is a lot more love needy, he’s lonely, he went through traumatizing experiences and he needs to feel loved, he wants to feel loved. After the car crash, when Stephen’s hands were broken, in the comics it’s clear how he spent all his money with alcohol and how he was a wandering homeless until he heard the rumors about Kamar Taj, so it’s quite easy to deduce he recurred to prostitution to get the money to keep drinking his alcohol and to get tickets to go to Kamar Taj. If you add the abuse he probably went through as a kid, his sexual life came out as something completely distorted, in the sense he can’t define well what he wants when he has sex with someone. He wants A LOT MORE EMOTIONAL LOVE AND ACCEPTANCE than just physical pleasure, but he goes for the casual sex regardless. Sex doesn’t scare him much because of all the shit he went through, he’s more scared of simple, soft acts of affection because during most part of his life, HE DIDN’T KNOW HOW IT WAS LIKE and there’s this bonus of being scared of physical affection AGAIN BECAUSE OF ABUSE.

If we gather his behavioral indicators, everything matches. Stephen has a crush for strong women, maybe representing the figures of his mother and sister, who were never strong enough to protect him from his father: in other words, he feels safe with them. In a Spider Man comic, Spidey also said one of the things Stephen hated the most was rude men who only thought about sex and physical shit and how that would turn Stephen off, meaning Stephen strongly dislikes abusive, authoritarian men (figure of his father) and has a harder time while trusting males rather than females (it’s deep in his mind, Stephen doesn’t know he’s like that) and that sure screwed Stephen in many occasion where he was easily manipulated by women who just wanted to use him and throw him away. Since Stephen wanted love and affection and felt safer with women, he was an easy target for characters such as Morgana and the Enchantress.

The character indeed is VERY complex and so many things about him are subtext or very close to explicit subtext (like when Stephen told Deadpool he should go to a doctor to check his nipples because he could have cancer, meaning Stephen saw and probably touched Deadpool’s nipples, meaning they probably had a few intimate moments together/ it was clear Stephen didn’t professionally examined Deadpool, otherwise he would have told him that during the appointment, not almost in the middle of a battle because that came to mind). The fact the first Doctor Strange came out on 1963 and SO MANY of his stories took place during the 70′s and 80′s, anything related to sexuality and abuse was written VERY IN SUBTEXT, but today we read that and see it’s almost obvious they added the subtext on purpose because there were many ways to write and draw a fact, so why did they do in that extremely suggestive way? It’s about things, lines and mentions we can’t confirm 100% but that still are very obvious, like when a couple starts kissing and stripping in a movie and the scene ends: we assume they had sex because they were naked on bed, but we never got to see them having sex: what if something went wrong and they didn’t? We never know, but still, we believe they had sex. It’s the same about all that subtext in the comics, the more open minded the public gets, the easier to notice all the little messages and indirect facts. 


End file.
